Chapter 4

I don't remember driving home. My body moved on autopilot while my mind replayed his words. Content farm. Content farm. Content farm.

I walked through the front door of our beautiful, empty house. The house he' d bought for us. The prison he' d built for me. The framed script pages on the wall seemed to mock me now, trophies of his deception.

I went straight to his home office. A room I rarely entered. He always said it was his "chaos space," full of boring contracts and production schedules.

His file cabinet was locked. I stood there for a moment, my mind a blank. Then, a thought sparked. Sabrina. I pulled out my phone and searched her name. Her Wikipedia page popped up. Her birthday.

May 24th. 0-5-2-4.

I knelt and turned the combination lock. Click. It opened.

My breath hitched. Inside, file after file, were copies of my scripts. Every single one I had written in the last five years. But my name wasn't on the cover page. In its place, typed in bold, were the words: "Directed by Sabrina Lawrence."

He hadn't even bothered to be creative with his password.

I moved to his laptop, sitting closed on the mahogany desk. I lifted the screen. It asked for a password. I typed in '0524'. It unlocked instantly.

The desktop background was a film poster. A beautifully designed, professional poster for "Dust Devil Heart." My story. My characters. And at the bottom, in stark white letters: "A Film by Sabrina Lawrence."

My hands were shaking so hard I could barely control the mouse. I opened his email. The outbox was a graveyard of my creativity. Years of messages, sent to an unmarked, anonymous email address. Emails with subject lines like "Scene 4 rewrite," "Character notes," "Final Draft." Each one contained a piece of my soul, packaged and delivered for someone else to claim.

I clicked on his cloud storage. It was a photo album of their life together. Ethan and Sabrina at Cannes, their arms around each other. Ethan and Sabrina on the set of my movie, him looking at her with that same adoring expression. Ethan and Sabrina holding up a Golden Globe, champagne glasses raised in a toast. A life I had unknowingly written for them.

The evidence was overwhelming, a digital mountain of his betrayal. He hadn't just stolen my work. He had stolen my life.